Superconductivity in planarised nanocrystalline diamond films

Abstract

Chemical vapour deposition (CVD) grown boron-doped nanocrystalline diamond (B-NCD) is an attractive material for the fabrication of high frequency superconducting nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) due to its high Young’s modulus. The as-grown films have a surface roughness that increases with film thickness due to the columnar growth mechanism. To reduce intrinsic losses in B-NCD NEMS it is crucial to correct for this surface roughness by polishing. In this paper, in contrast to conventional polishing, it is demonstrated that the root-mean-square (RMS) roughness of a 520 nm thick B-NCD film can be reduced by chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) from 44.0 nm to 1.5 nm in 14 hours without damaging the sample or introducing significant changes to the superconducting transition temperature, $ T_C $, thus enabling the use of B-NCD films in the fabrication of high quality superconducting NEMS.

Keywords

• Boron doped diamond
• surface roughness
• chemical mechanical polishing
• chemical vapour deposition
• superconductivity